FR-L-MIGR-TWIT Corpus. Migration Tweets of French Left-wing Politics.

The FR-L-MIGR-TWIT Corpus is part of the MIGR-TWIT CORPUS, diachronic bilingual corpus of Tweets about the topic of migration in Europe.
Within the framework of the collaborative research project OLiNDiNUM (Observatoire LINguistique du DIscours NUMérique, [Linguistic Observatory of Online Debate]), the MIGR-TWIT Corpora are created with the aim to study the evolution of the public discourse on migration in Europe during the past dozen years from 2011 to 2022. First two components of the corpus represent migration discourse of right-wing politics in France and in the UK. The FR-L-MIGR-TWIT Corpus represents French left-wing politics' migration discourse on Twitter.  

Using the Twitter API v2 Academic Research, the Tweets containing at least one occurrence of lexicon derived from a latin root "migr" of migrare are automatically retrieved from 23 Twitter accounts of French left-wing political figures and parties.
 

Scientific reference :  Jeon, S. (2025). Le discours numérique sur l'immigration en France entre 2011 et 2022. Une analyse de corpus (Online Discourse on Immigration in France between 2011 and 2022. A Corpus Analysis), PhD Thesis, Université de Lille, France.

Contents
The downloadable version of FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 Corpus contains 32 CSV files (tabular format). The corpus is presented in simplified and complete versions in terms of metadata. The simplified version corresponds to one single file named FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022.csv, containing four basic (meta)data, i.e. identifier, text, posting date and username (that is, data__id, data__text, data__created_at and author__name as the table hearder elements). In addition to these four (meta)data, the elaborate version is provided with all Tweet fields information included as a header element, such as the numbers of Replies, Retweets, Likes and Quotes, etc. This version is also available in one single CSV file named FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022_meta.csv.

Besides, the elaborate version is provided with three CSV Zip files: 7 CSV files in the zip file named FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-YEAR_meta correspond to grouped years (i.e. FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2016_meta.csv) or each and every year (e.g. FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2017_meta.csv, and so on) for the last dozen years. 23 files in the zip file named FR-L-NAME-MIGR-TWIT_meta for each and every component of selected French left-wing political figures and parties (e.g. FR-L-Arthaud-TWIT_meta.csv). The zip file named FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022_meta contains yearly Tweets of each and every component of political figures and parties.

Detailed information of the FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 CORPUS is illustrated below.

• Created at: 2023-04-18
• Language: FR
• Coverage: 23 user accounts ; 5,636 Tweets ; 169,818 words
• Time of data collection: start=2011-01-01 ; end=2022-06-30
• Keywords: words derived from a latine root “migr” of migrare
• Corpus composition:

• Political figures and parties, listed in alphabetical order, are selected according to the four criteria: (1) the high number of migr-tweets, (2) the political affiliation, (3) the political careers, that is, the Member of the European Parliament or (4) the presidential candidate during the period between 2011 and 2022. These four criteria are not mutually exclusive.
• As part of a doctoral thesis (Jeon, 2025), the FR-L-MIGR-TWIT and FR-R-MIGR-TWIT corpora are compiled, annotated and analyzed through a comparative discourse analysis approach, with the aim to study the semantic construction of migr-lexicon over the period between 2011 and 2022.
• *One migration Tweet retrieved from the user account @montebourg for the year of 2019 was removed and is not included in his 7 migr-tweets because it refers to the issue of the migration of honey bees.
• **We later added the user account @EstherBenbassa represented by Esther Benbassa, senator and former member of political party Europe Écologie-Les Verts (representative of the user account @EELV), because of the high number of her migr-tweets that were retweeted by @EELV.

The MIGR-TWIT Corpus consists of three subcorpora for a total amount of 23,869 Tweets and 703,016 words:

• FR-R-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 Corpus: French Right-wing politics' migr-tweets
• UK-R-MIGR-RA-TWIT-2011-2022 Corpus: British Right-wing politics' migr-tweets
• FR-L-MIGR-TWIT-2011-2022 Corpus: French Left-wing politics' migr-tweets